Bookmarked web pages, sometimes called “favorites,” are commonly stored and organized by a user in a collection, such as on a web page or in a folder hierarchy within a web browser. Typically, a user bookmarks a web page if he or she wants to visit the web page at some future time or if the web page was difficult to find. This is because having a web page referenced in this fashion can significantly reduce the time that it takes to navigate to the web page.
A user's collection of bookmarked web pages, and their own particular manner of organizing it, tends to take on a special familiarity or significance to a user over time. However, as the number of bookmarked web pages in a user's collection begins to grow large, a user often becomes frustrated with managing the collection. As a result of the user's frustration and the unwieldiness of managing a large collection of bookmarked web pages, a user's collection often ends up with a large number of duplicates and/or links to web pages that no longer exist.
Moreover, a collection of bookmarked web pages is only useful to a user if they add web pages to it. When a user's collection becomes large, it sometimes becomes cluttered. This leads to difficulty and frustration in a user finding a particular web page among the clutter and confusion of other bookmarked web pages which may be duplicates, may rarely (if ever) be accessed, or may be non-functional (e.g., links to web pages that no longer exist). In many instances, a large collection of bookmarked web pages can be frustrating enough to cause a user to quit adding web pages to it. The user may then become even more frustrated when they forget how to navigate to a particular web page or else spend considerable time or effort in navigating to a particular web page, which they could have, but didn't bookmark.